539
Labour Conflicts in Transport, Logistics and Infrastructure
Abstract Submissions Closed
RC44 Labor Movements (host committee)
Language: English
Session Type: Oral
Various publications in the past years identified workers in logistics as a new power centre, able to block crucial choke points, and identified logistics as a central moment of global production networks. This session aims to evaluate those claims by locating capital investment and labour conflict in transport, infrastructure and logistics in a wider realm: how is the current wave of infrastructure investment related to the profit-squeeze in the global economy? To what extent are economic cycles in transport and logistics dependent on production volumes in other sectors? Another issue is the dependency of transport and logistics on larger infrastructure and energy policies.
These questions raise doubts if workers in infrastructure, logistics and transport are able to assume a central role for the labour movement without linkages to workers from other sectors. In fact, previous strike movements of truck drivers have at times acted jointly with workers in the petroleum industry (e.g. in France, Nigeria, Brazil). Evaluations of the movement of logistics workers in the North of Italy have highlighted the lack of common action with workers from other sectors as a crucial limit. Logistics, transport and infrastructure have seen a large amount of labour unrest in the past ten years, but how are they embedded into and can be articulated with other social conflicts in society?